Every great profession has its own way of hypnotising the souls of simple men. Indeed I think that professions are accounted great in accordance with their power of impressing on the world a sense of their mysteriousness. Ecclesiastics, those of them who know their business, build altars in dim recesses of vast buildings, light them with flickering tapers, and fill the air with clouds of stupefying incense smoke. Surgeons and dentists allow us fleeting glimpses of bright steel instruments, very strangely shaped. It is contrived that we see them in a cold, clear light, the light of scientific relentlessness. There is a suggestion of torture, not brutal but exquisitely refined, of perfected pain, achieved by the stimulation of recondite nerves of very delicate sensibility. Lawyers wear archaic robes and use a strange language in their mysteries, conveying to us a belief that Justice is an ancient witch whose evil eye can be averted only by the incantation and grotesque posturing of her initiate priests. But I am not sure that financiers do not understand the art of hypnotic suggestion best of all. I have worshipped in cathedrals, sweated cold in operating theatres, trembled before judges, but there is something about large surfaces of polished mahogany and very soft, dimly coloured turkey carpets which quells my feeble spirit still more completely.

There was a heavy deadening silence in Ascher's private office, and our voices, when they broke it, sounded like the cheeping of ghosts. There was an odour more oppressive than the smell of incense or the penetrating fumes of iodoform. Some one, many hours before, must have smoked a very good cigar in the room, and the scent of it lingered. The doors of huge safes must have been opened. From the recesses of these steel chambers had oozed air which had lain stagnant and lifeless round piles of gold bonds and rich securities for years and years. The faint, sickly odour of sealing wax must have been distilled from immense sticks of that substance and sprinkled overnight upon the carpets and leather-seated chairs. I breathed and my very limbs felt numb.

But certain souls are proof against the subtlest forms of hypnotism. Gorman had escaped from the influence of his church. He would flip a sterilised lancet across a glass slab with his finger and laugh in the face of the surgeon who owned it. He walked with buoyant confidence into Ascher's office. My case was different. I stood and then sat, the victim of a partial anaesthetic. I saw and heard dimly as if in a dream, or through a mist. Poor Tim trembled as he laid his cash register down on one of Ascher's mahogany tables. I could hear the keys and bars of the machine rattling together while he handled it.

Ascher spoke through a telephone receiver which stood at his elbow. Another man entered the room. We all shook hands with him. He was Stutz, the New York partner of the firm. Then Ascher spoke through the receiver again, and another man came in.

With him we did not shake hands, but he bowed to us and we to him. He was Mr. Mildmay. He stood near the door, waiting for orders.

Tim Gorman unpacked his machine and exhibited it I have not the remotest idea what its peculiar virtues are, but Tim believed in them. His nervousness seemed to pass away from him as he spoke about his invention with simple-minded enthusiasm. Love casts out fear, and there is no doubt that Tim loved every screw and lever of the complicated mechanism.

Mr. Mildmay left his place near the door and came forward. His deferential manner dropped off from him. He revealed himself as a mechanical expert with a special knowledge of cash registers. He and Tim Gorman pressed keys, twisted handles and bent together in absorbed contemplation over some singular feature of the machine's organism. Gorman, the elder brother, watched them with a confident smile. Ascher and Stutz sat gravely silent. They waited Mildmay's opinion. He was the man of the moment. A few minutes before he had bowed respectfully to Ascher. In half an hour he would be bowing respectfully to Ascher again. Just then, while he handled Tim Gorman's machine, he was Ascher's master, and mine of course. They were all my masters.

The inspection of the machine was finished at last. Tim stood flushed and triumphant. The child of his ingenious brain had survived the tests of an expert. Mildmay turned to Ascher and bowed again.

"It's a wonderful invention," he said. "I see no reason why it should not be a commercial success."

"Perhaps, Mr. Mildmay," said Ascher, "you will study the subject further and submit a report to us in writing."

Mr. Mildmay left the room. I had no doubt that he would report enthusiastically on the new cash register. Mechanical experts do not, I suppose, write poetry, but there was without doubt a lyric in Mildmay's heart as he left the room. Tim packed the thing up again. Now that the mechanical part of the business was over, he relapsed into shy silence in a corner. His brother took out a cigarette and lit it I would not have ventured to light a cigarette in that sanctuary for a hundred pounds. But Gorman is entirely without reverence.

"Well," he said, "there's no doubt about the value of the invention."

"We shall wait for Mr. Mildmay's report," said Ascher, "before we come to any decision; but in the meanwhile we should like to hear any proposal you have to make."

"Yes," said Stutz, "your proposals. We are prepared to listen to them."

Stutz seemed to me to speak English with difficulty. His native language was perhaps German, perhaps Hebrew or Yiddish or whatever the language is which modern Jews speak in private life.

"The matter is simple enough," said Gorman. "Our machine will drive any other out of the market. There's no possibility of competition. The thing is simply a dead cert. It can't help going."

"A large capital would be required," said Stutz, "a very large capital."

"Yes," said Gorman, "a very large capital, much larger than I should care to see invested in the thing. I may as well be quite frank with you gentlemen. At present the patents of my brother's invention are owned by a small company in which I am the chief shareholder. If we ask the public for a million dollars and get them—I don't say we can't get them. We may. But if we do I shall be a very small shareholder. I shall get 5 per cent, or 6 per cent, or perhaps 10 per cent, on my money. Now I want more than that. I'm speaking quite frankly, you see. I believe in frankness."

He looked at Ascher for approval. Stutz bowed, with an impassive face. On Ascher's lips there was the ghost of a mournful little smile. I somehow gathered that he had come across frankness like Gorman's before and had not altogether liked it. Gorman went on. He explained, as he had explained to me, the plan he had made for forcing the owners of existing cash registers to buy his company out. At last he got to the central, the vitally important point.

"All we want, gentlemen, is your backing. You needn't put down any money. Your names will be enough. I will make over to you such bonus shares as may be agreed upon. The only risk we run is lawsuits about our patent rights. You understand how that game is worked. I needn't explain."

It was evident that both Ascher and Stutz understood that game thoroughly. It was also plain to me, though not, I think, to Gorman, that it was a game which neither one nor other of them would be willing to play.

"But if we have your names," said Gorman, "that game's off. It simply wouldn't pay. I don't want to flatter you, gentlemen, but there isn't a firm in the world that would care to start feeing lawyers in competition with Ascher Stutz & Co."

"That is so," said Stutz.

"And your proposal?" said Ascher.

"If they can't crush us," said Gorman, "and they can't if you're behind us, they must buy us. I need scarcely say that your share in the profits will be satisfactory to you. Sir James Digby is one of our directors. There are only four others, and three of them scarcely count. There won't be many of us to divide what we get."

I felt that my time had come to speak. If I was to justify Gorman's confidence in me as an "influence," I must say something. Besides Ascher was looking at me inquiringly.

"I'm not a business man," I said, "and I'm afraid that my opinion isn't worth much, but I think——"

I hesitated. Ascher's eyes were fixed on me, and there was a curiously wistful expression in them. I could not understand what he wanted me to say.

"I think," I said, "that Gorman's plan sounds feasible, that it ought to work."

"But your own opinion of it?" said Ascher.

He spoke with a certain gentle insistency. I could not very well avoid making some answer.

"We are able to judge for ourselves," he said, "whether it will work. But the plan itself—what do you think of it?"

"Well," I said, "I'm a modern man. I have accepted all the ideas and standards of my time and generation. I can hardly give you an opinion that I could call my own, but if my father's opinion would be of any use to you—— He was an old-fashioned gentleman, with all the rather obsolete ideas about honour which those people had."

"He's dead, isn't he?" said Gorman.

"Oh, yes," I said. "He's been dead for fifteen years. Still I'm sure I could tell you what he'd have said about this."

"I do not think," said Stutz, "that we need consider the opinion of Sir James Digby's father, who has been dead for fifteen years."

"I quite agree with you," I said. "It would be out of date, hopelessly."

"But your own opinion?" said Ascher, still mildly insistent.

"Well," I said, "I've been robbed of my property—land in Ireland, Mr. Stutz—by Gorman and his friends. Everybody says that they were quite right and that I ought not to have objected; so I suppose robbery must be a proper thing according to our contemporary ethics."

"And that is your opinion of the scheme?" said Ascher.

"Yes," I said. "I hope I've made myself clear. I think we are justified in pillaging when we can."

"You Irish," said Ascher, "with your intellects of steel, your delight in paradox and your reckless logic!"

Stutz was not interested in the peculiarities of the Irish mind. He went back to the main point with a directness which I admired.

"This is not," he said, "the kind of business we care to do."

"Mr. Gorman," said Ascher, "we shall wait for Mr. Mildmay's report on your brother's invention. If it turns out to be favourable, as I confidently expect, we may have a proposal to lay before you. Our firm cannot, you will understand, take shares in your company. That is not a bank's business. But I myself, in my private capacity, will consider the matter. So will Mr. Stutz. It may be possible to arrange that your brother's machine shall be put on the market."

"But your proposal," said Stutz obstinately. "It is not the kind of business we undertake."

The interview was plainly at an end. We rose and left the room.

Tim Gorman did not understand, perhaps did not hear, a word of what was said. He followed us out of the office nursing his machine and plainly in high delight. Curiously enough, the elder Gorman seemed equally pleased.

"We've got them," he said when we reached the street. "We've got Ascher, Stutz & Co quite safe. I don't see what's to stop us now."

My own impression was that both Ascher & Stutz had definitely refused to entertain our proposal or fall in with our plans. I said so to Gorman.

"Not at all," he said. "You don't understand business or business men. Ascher and Stutz are very big bugs, very big indeed, and they have to keep up appearances. It wouldn't do for them to admit to you and me, or even to each other, that they were out for what they could get from the old company. They have to keep up the pretence that they mean legitimate business. That's the way these things are always worked. But you'll find that they won't object to pocketing their cheques when the time comes for smashing up Tim's machine and suppressing his patents."

I turned, when I reached the far side of the street, to take another look at Ascher's office. I was struck again by the purity of line and the severe simplicity of the building. Two thousand years ago men would have had a statue of Pallas Athene in it.



CHAPTER VI.

I spent a very pleasant fortnight in New York among people entirely unconnected with the Aschers or Gorman. I was kept busy dining, lunching, going to the theatre, driving here and there in motor cars, and enjoying the society of some of the least conventional and most brilliant women in the world. I only found time to call on the Aschers once and then did not see either of them. They were stopping in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the young man in the office told me that Mrs. Ascher spent the whole of every day in her studio. Her devotion to art was evidently very great. She could not manage to spend a holiday in New York without hiring a studio. I inquired whether any members of the Galleotti family were sitting for her, but the hotel clerk did not know that. He told me, however, that Mr. Ascher was in Washington. Gorman always says that the strings of government in modern states are pulled by financiers. Ascher was probably chucking at those which are fastened to the arms and legs of the President of the United States, with a view to making that potentate dance threateningly in the direction of Mexico. I am sure that Ascher does this sort of thing very nicely and kindly if indeed he does it at all. He would not willingly destroy the self-respect even of a marionette.

Of Gorman I saw nothing more before I left New York. I think he went off to Detroit almost immediately after our interview with Ascher and Stutz. Gorman is not exactly the man to put his public duties before his private interests, but I am sure the public duties always come in a close second. Having settled, or thought he had settled, the affair of the cash register, he immediately turned his attention to that wealthy motor man in Detroit from whom he meant to get a subscription. The future of the Irish Party possibly, its comforts probably, depended on the success of Gorman's mission. And a party never deserved comfort more. The Home Rule Bill was almost passed for the third and last time. Nothing stood between Ireland and the realisation of Gorman's hopes for her except the obstinate perversity of the Ulster men. A few more subscriptions, generous subscriptions, and that would be overcome.

After enjoying myself in New York for a fortnight I went to Canada. I did not gather much information about the companies in which I was interested. But I learned a good deal about Canadian politics. The men who play that game out there are extraordinarily clearsighted and honest. They frankly express lower opinions of each other than the politicians of any other country would dare to hold of the players in their particular fields. In the end the general frankness became monotonous and I tired of Canada. I went back to New York, hoping to pick up some one there who would travel home with me by way of the West Indies, islands which I had never seen. I thought it possible that I might persuade the Aschers, if they were still in New York, to make the tour with me. There was just a chance that I might come across Gorman again and that he would be taken with the idea of preaching the doctrines of Irish nationalism in Jamaica. I called on the Aschers twice and missed them both times. But the second visit was not fruitless. Mrs. Ascher rang me up on the telephone and asked me to go to see her in her studio. She said that she particularly wanted to see me and had something very important to say.

I obeyed the summons, of course. I found Mrs. Ascher clad in a long, pale-blue pinafore. Over-all is, I believe, the proper name for the garment. But it looked to me like a child's pinafore, greatly enlarged. It completely covered all her other clothes in front and almost completely covered them behind. I recognised it as the sort of thing a really earnest artist would wear while working. Her hair was hanging in loops and wisps about her head, a disorder which was effective with dark-red hair. Her hands were damp and dirty. Her face was smudged here and there, as if, in moments of artistic travail, she had pressed her muddy fingers against her forehead and chin. The room had very little furniture in it, but there were several tables, large and small. On these stood what seemed to me shapeless lumps of various sizes, swathed in damp rags. They reminded me a little of the shrouded objects on the tables of dissecting rooms after the students have gone home. There was the same suggestion of mutilated human forms. Mrs. Archer saw me looking at them.

"Some of my little things," she said, "but nothing finished. I don't know why it is, but here in New York I find it very difficult to finish anything."

"You're not singular in that," I said. "The New York people themselves suffer in exactly the same way. There isn't a street in their city that they've finished or ever will finish. If anything begins to look like completion they smash it up at once and start fresh. It must be something in the air, a restlessness, a desire of the perfection which can never be realised."

Mrs. Ascher very carefully unwrapped a succession of damp rags from one of the largest of her lumps which was standing on a table by itself. I have, since then, seen nurses unwrapping the bandages from the wounded limbs of men. The way they did it always reminded me of Mrs. Ascher. The removal of the last bandage revealed to me a figure about eighteen inches high of a girl who seemed to me to be stretching herself after getting out of bed before stepping into her bath.

"Psyche," said Mrs. Ascher.

I had to show my admiration in some way. The proper thing, I believe, when shown a statue by a sculptor, is to stroke it with your fingers and murmur, "Ah!" I was afraid to stroke Psyche because she was certainly wet and probably soft. A touch might have dinted her, made a dimple in a wrong place. I dared not risk it. It became all the more necessary to speak.

The first thing I thought of was a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe.

"I pacified Psyche and kissed her," I murmured, "and tempted her out of the gloom."

I said the lines in what I am convinced is the proper way, as if they were forced from me, as if I spoke them to myself and did not mean them to be heard. I do not think Mrs. Ascher knew them. I fear she suspected me of making some sort of joke. I hastened to redeem my character.

"Psyche," I said, "the soul."

I was right so far. Psyche is the Greek for the soul. I ventured further.

"The human soul, the artistic soul."

Mrs. Ascher appeared to be absolutely hanging on my words. I plunged on.

"Aspiring," I said, "reaching after the unattainable."

I would not have said, "hoping for a yawn" for anything that could have been offered me; but the young woman who stood for Mrs. Ascher's Psyche must have longed for that relief. The attitude in which she was posed suggested yawning all the time, and we all know how fatal it is to think of a yawn.

"Quite unfinished," said Mrs. Ascher with a sigh.

"The fault of New York," I said. "When you get home again——"

I hesitated. I did not wish to commit myself to a confession of ignorance, and I do not know whether a damp, soft Psyche can be packed up and transported across the Atlantic to be finished in London.

"But the aspiration is there," I said, "and you owe that to New York. The air, the very same air which forbids completion, is charged with aspiration. We all feel it. The city itself aspires. Since the great days when men set out to build a tower the top of which should reach unto heaven, there has never been such aspiration anywhere in the world. Look at the Woolworth Building."

I was maundering and I knew it Mrs. Ascher's statuette was very nice and graceful; a much better thing than I expected to see, but there was nothing in it, nothing at all in the way of thought or emotion. There must be hundreds of people who can turn out clay girls just as good as that Psyche. Somehow I had expected something different from Mrs. Ascher, less skill in modelling, less care, but more temperament.

"There's nothing else worth showing," she said, "except perhaps this. Yes, except this."

She unwrapped more bandages. A damp, pale-grey head appeared. It was standing in a large saucer or soup plate. At first I thought she had been at John the Baptist and had chosen the moment when his head lay in the charger ready for the dancing girl to take to her mother. Fortunately I looked at it carefully before speaking. I saw that it was Tim Gorman's head.

"He sat to me," said Mrs. Ascher, "and by degrees I came to know him very well. One does, one cannot help it, talking to a person every day and watching, always watching. Do you think——?"

"I think it's wonderful," I said.

This time I spoke with real and entire conviction. I am no expert judge of anything in the world except perhaps a horse or a bottle of claret, but I was impressed by this piece of Mrs. Ascher's work. Tim Gorman's fine eyes were the only things about him which struck me as noticeable. No artist can model eyes in clay. But Mrs. Ascher had got all that I saw in his eyes into the head before me—all and a great deal more. She had somehow succeeded in making the lips, the nostrils, the forehead, the cheek-bones, express the fact that Tim Gorman is an idealist, a dreamer of fine dreams and at the same time innocent as a child which looks out at the world with wonder. I do not know how the woman did it. I should not have supposed her capable of even seeing what she had expressed in her clay, but there it was.

"You really like it?"

She spoke with a curious note of humility in her voice. My impulse was to say that I liked her, for the first time saw the real good in her; but I could not say that.

"Like it!" I said. "It isn't for me to like or dislike it. I don't know anything about those things. I am not capable of judging. But this seems to me to be really great."

"Ah!" said Mrs. Ascher, "and this time you are sincere."

She looked at me quite gravely as she spoke. Then a smile slowly broadened her mouth.

"That's not the way you spoke of poor Psyche's aspiration," she said, "you were laughing at me then."

A cold sweat broke out on my forehead. The woman had understood every word I said to her, understood what I meant as well as what I wanted to convey to her, two very different things. She was immensely more clever than I suspected or could have guessed.

"Mrs. Ascher," I said, "I beg your pardon."

"You were quite right," she said. "That other thing isn't Psyche. It's just a silly little girl, the model—— There wasn't anything about her that I could see, nothing but just a pretty body."

So she dismissed my apology and turned to Tim Gorman's head again. She ran her finger lightly round the rim of the saucer.

"What shall I do with this?" she said. "What is his head to stand on, to rise from? I was thinking of water-lily leaves, as if the head were emerging——"

I felt that I owed Mrs. Ascher some frankness in return for my first insult to her intelligence. Besides, I was moved. I was, as I had not been for years, emotional. Tim Gorman's head gripped me in a curious way.

"Good God, Woman," I said, "anything in the world but that! Wrap up that chorus girl of a Psyche in leaves if you like. Sprinkle rose petals over her or any other damned sentimentalism. But this man is a mechanic. He has invented a cash register. What in the name of all that's holy has he got to do with water-lily leaves? Put hammers round his head, and pincers, and long nails."

I stopped. I realised suddenly that I was making an unutterable fool of myself. I was talking as I never talked in my life before, saying out loud the sort of things I have carefully schooled myself neither to feel nor to think.

"After all," said Mrs. Ascher, "you have an artist's soul."

I shuddered. Mrs. Ascher looked at me and smiled again, a half-pitiful smile.

"I suppose I must have," I said. "But I won't let it break loose in that way again. I'll suppress it. It's—it's—this is rather an insulting thing to say to you, but it's a humiliating discovery to make that I have——"

Mrs. Ascher nodded.

"My husband always says that you Irish——"

"He's quite wrong," I said; "quite wrong about me at all events. I hate paradoxes. I'm a plain man. The only thing I really admire is common sense."

"I understand," she said. "I understand exactly what you feel."

She is a witch and very likely did understand. I did not.

"Now," she said. "Now, I can talk to you. Sit down, please."

She pulled over a low stool, the only seat in the room. I sat on it. Mrs. Ascher stood, or rather drooped in front of me, leaning on one hand, which rested, palm down, on the table where Tim Gorman's image stood. I doubt whether Mrs. Ascher ever stands straight or is capable of any kind of stiffness. But even drooping, she had a distinct advantage over me. My stool was very low and my legs are long. If I ventured to lean forwards, my knees would have touched my chin, a position in which it is impossible for a man to assert himself.

"I am so very glad," she said, "that you like the little head."

I was not going to be caught again. One lapse into artistic fervour was enough for me. Even at the risk of offending Mrs. Ascher beyond forgiveness, I was determined to preserve my self-respect.

"I wish you wouldn't take my word for it's being good," I said. "Ask somebody who knows. The fact that I like it is a proof that it's bad, bad art, if it's a proof of anything. I never really admire anything good, can't bear, simply can't bear old masters, or"—I dimly recollected some witty essays by my brilliant fellow-countryman Mr. George Moore—"I detest Corot. My favourite artist is Leader."

Mrs. Ascher smiled all the time I was speaking.

"I know quite well," she said, "that my work isn't good. But you saw what I meant by it. You can't deny it now, and you know that the boy is like that."

"I don't know anything of the sort. I don't know anything at all about him. The only time I ever came into touch with him he was helping his brother to persuade Mr. Ascher to go into a doubtful—well, to make money by what I'd call sharp practice."

"I don't think he was," said Mrs. Ascher. "The elder brother may have been doing what you say; but Tim wasn't."

"He was in the game," I said.

I spoke all the more obstinately because I knew that Tim was not in the game, I was determined not to be hysterical again.

"I've had that poor boy here day after day," said Mrs. Ascher, "and I really know him. He has the soul of an artist. He is a creator. He is one of humanity's mother natures. You know how it is with us. Something quickens in us. We travail and bring to the birth."

Mrs. Ascher evidently included herself among the mother natures. It seemed a pity that she had not gone about the business in the ordinary way. I think she would have been happier if she had. However, the head of Tim Gorman was something. She had produced it.

"That is art," she said dreamily, "conception, gestation, travail, birth. It does not matter whether the thing born is a poem, a picture, a statue, a sonata, a temple——"

"Or a cash register," I said.

The thing born might apparently be anything except an ordinary baby. The true artist does not think much of babies. They are bourgeois things.

"Or a cash register," she said. "It makes no difference. The man who creates, who brings into being, has only one desire, that his child, whatever it may be, shall live. If it is stifled, killed, a sword goes through his heart."

It seemed to me even then with Mrs. Ascher's eyes on me, that it was rather absurd to talk about a cash register living. I do not think that men have ever personified this machine. We talk of ships and engines by the names we give them and use personal pronouns, generally feminine, when we speak of them. But did any one ever call a cash register "Minnie" or talk of it familiarly as "she"?

"He thinks," said Mrs. Ascher, "indeed he is sure—he says his brother told him——"

"I know," I said. "The machine isn't going to be put on the market at all. It is to be used simply as a threat to make other people pay what I should call blackmail."

"That must not be," said Mrs. Ascher.

Her voice was pitched a couple of tones higher than usual. I might almost say she shrieked.

"It must not be," she repeated, "must not. It is a crime, a vile act, the murder of a soul."

Cash registers have not got souls. I am as sure of that as I am of anything.

"That boy," she went on, "that passionate, brave, pure boy, he must not be dragged down, defiled. His soul——"

It was Tim Gorman's soul then, not the cash registers, which she was worrying about. Having seen her presentation of the boy's head, having it at that moment before my eyes, I understood what she meant. But I was not going to let myself be swept again into the regions of artistic passion to please Mrs. Ascher.

"Well," I said, "it does seem rather a shady way of making money. But after all——"

I have mentioned that Mrs. Ascher never stands upright. She went very near it when I mentioned money.

She threw her head back, flung both her arms out wide, clenched her fists tightly, and, if the expression is possible, drooped backwards from her hips. A slightly soiled light-blue overall is not the garment best suited to set off the airs and attitudes of high tragedy. But Mrs. Ascher's feelings were strong enough to transfigure even her clothes.

"Money!" she said. "Oh, Money! Is there nothing else? Do you care for, hope for, see nothing else in the world? What does it matter whether you make money or not, or how you make it?"

It is only those who are very rich indeed or those who are on the outer fringe of extreme poverty who can despise money in this whole-hearted way. The wife of a millionaire—the millionaire himself probably attaches some value to money because he has to get it—and the regular tramp can say "Oh, money? Is there nothing else?" The rest of us find money a useful thing and get what we can of it.

Mrs. Ascher let her arms fall suddenly to her sides, folded herself up and sat down, or rather crouched, on the floor. From that position she looked up at me with the greatest possible intensity of eye.

"I know what you're thinking," she said. "You're thinking of my husband. But he hates money just as much as I do. All he wants to escape, to have done with it, to live peaceably with me, somewhere far away, far, far away from everywhere."

Her eyes softened as she spoke. They even filled with water, tears, I suppose. But she seemed to me to be talking nonsense. Ascher was making money, piling it up. He could stop if he liked. So I thought. So any sensible man must think. And as for living somewhere far, far away, what did the woman want to get away from? Every possible place of residence on the earth's surface is near some other place. You cannot get far, far away from everywhere. The thing is a physical impossibility. I made an effort to get back to common sense.

"About Tim Gorman's cash register?" I said. "What would you suggest?"

"You mustn't let them do that hateful thing," she said. "You can stop them if you will."

"I don't believe I can," I said. "I'm extraordinarily feeble and ineffectual in every way. In business matters I'm a mere babe."

"Mr. Gorman will listen to you," she said. "He will understand if you explain to him. He is a writer, an artist. He must understand."

I shook my head. Gorman can write. I admit that. His writing is a great deal better than Mrs. Ascher's modelling, though she did do that head of Tim. I do not hail Gorman's novels or his plays as great literature, though they are good. But some of his criticism is the finest thing of its kind that has been published in our time. But Gorman does not look at these matters as Mrs. Ascher does. I do not believe he ever wrote a line in his life without expecting to be paid for it. He would not write at all if he could find any easier and pleasanter way of making money. There was no use saying that to Mrs. Ascher. All I could do when she asked me to appeal to Gorman's artistic soul was to shake my head. I shook it as decisively as I could.

"And my husband will listen to you," she said.

"My dear lady! wouldn't he be much more likely to listen to you?"

"But we never talk about such things," she said. "Never, never. Our life together is sacred, hallowed, a thing apart,

"'Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call earth.'"

It surprised me to hear Mrs. Ascher quote Milton. I did not somehow expect to find that she knew or liked that particular poet. I am nearly sure he would not have liked her.

"We cannot desecrate our union," she said, "by talking about money."

The subject to be discussed with Ascher was plainly not money, but Tim Gorman's soul. Money only came incidentally. However, there was no use arguing a point like that. There was no use arguing any point. I gave in and promised to see Ascher about the matter. I prefer Ascher to Gorman if I have to persuade any one to act midwife at the birth of a cash register. Gorman would be certain to laugh. Ascher would at all events listen to me courteously.

"To-morrow," said Mrs. Ascher.

"Certainly," I said. "To-morrow, quite early."

Mrs. Ascher uncoiled herself and rose from the floor. I struggled to my feet rather stiffly, for my stool was far too low. She took my hand and held it. I feared for a moment that she meant to kiss it.

"Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you again and again."

I took a long walk after I left the studio. I wanted to assimilate a new fact, to get my mental vision into focus again.

Ever since I thought about things at all, I have regarded the "artist" outlook upon life as a pose, and the claim to artistic temperament as an excuse for selfishness and bad temper in private life. Mrs. Ascher had convinced me that, in her case at least, the artist soul is a reality. She was hysterical and ridiculous when she talked to me, but she was sincere. She was not posing even when she crumpled herself upon the floor and looked like a sick serpent. She was in simple earnest when she mouthed her lines about money, money. There might be, probably were, several other people in the world like Mrs. Ascher, might even be many others. That was the new fact which I wanted to digest.

I reflected that I myself was kin to her, had in me, latent and undeveloped, an artist's soul. I had felt the thing fluttering when I lost my self-control and talked flamboyantly about the head of Tim Gorman. It was necessary that I should keep a firm grip on myself. I belong to a class which has lost everything except its sanity. I think it is true of the Irish aristocracy that even its period of greatest glory, even when Grattan was waving his arms and shouting "Esto Perpetua!" it remained sane. I have nothing else left of what my forefathers bequeathed to me, but I still have this temperament. A man clings desperately to the last remnants of his heritage.

The artist's soul is a reality. I admitted that. But it is also a disease. I had learned to believe in it as a man learns to believe in influenza when his temperature runs up to 104 degrees and his bones ache furiously. But there is a difference between admitting the existence of a disease and deliberately cultivating the germs of it.

I crossed 5th Avenue at 32nd Street in great peril of my life, for the traffic at that point is as wild as the emotions of the artistic soul.

It came into my mind that quite possibly the thrills and throbs which Mrs. Ascher enjoys, of which I myself had a brief and mild experience, are not only real, but worth while. There may after all be something greater in the world than common sense. I fell to dreaming of what life might be like to the man who refused to take it as it is, who insisted on seeing above him, not silly little twinkling stars, but great worlds coursing through the infinite spaces of eternity. I ran into a boy carrying books, while I was thinking about eternity. His books were scattered over the pavement and I hurt my knee. I decided that my faint longing for what Mrs. Ascher would call "higher possibilities" is a temptation, something to be conquered. I finished my meditation with a "Retro Satanas" and returned to my hotel for luncheon, confident that I should come out victor in my struggle.

Ascher has certainly far more determination and force of character than I have; but he does not seem able to break himself of the habit of making money. His wife says that he hates doing it and wants to stop. But he goes on doing it. He has formed a habit of making money, and habit is almost unconquerable. It was plainly the path of wisdom for me to check my tendency towards art at the very beginning, not to allow the habit of feeling artistically, indeed of feeling at all, to form itself.



CHAPTER VII.

I had no idea of breaking the promise I made Mrs. Ascher; but I felt a certain hesitation about entering again the Holiest of Holies in the office of Ascher, Stutz & Co. I was a little afraid of Stutz, who seemed to me a severe man, very little tolerant of human folly. Still I would have faced Stutz without shrinking, especially in a good cause. What I really disliked was the idea of suggesting a business policy to Ascher. The man was immeasurably my superior in natural ability and in experience. I felt that I should be guilty of insolence if I offered him any advice, and of something worse than insolence if I insisted on my advice being taken. Yet it was just this which Mrs. Ascher expected of me, and I did not want to disappoint her.

It is true that I was a shareholder in the New Excelsior Cash Register Company. I may have been a director. Gorman said something about my being a director. I had accepted the office, pledged beforehand to the approval of Gorman's policy and therefore had no right to intervene. What claim had I to insist on Ascher's doing this or that? I should not feel myself justified in calling on an archbishop and insisting on drastic alterations in the Apostle's Creed. Ascher is at least an archbishop, possibly a patriarch, or even a cardinal, in that truly catholic church which worships Mammon.

But I had promised.

I went to the office next morning, early. Having forgotten to make an appointment with Ascher beforehand I had to wait some time before I saw him. I sat in the large anteroom through which I had passed when I first visited the office with Gorman. Through the glass door I was able to see the public office outside where men went busily to and fro.

I understood just enough about this business of Ascher's to be able to read romance, the romance which was certainly there, in the movements of the quiet men who passed and repassed before my eyes, or bent with rarely lifted heads over huge ledgers, or turned over with deft fingers piles of papers in stuffed filing boxes. These men were in touch with the furthest ends of the earth. Coded telegrams fluttered from their hands and went vibrating across thousands of miles of land or through the still depths of oceans, over unlighted tracts of ooze on the sea-bottom. In London the words were read and men set free pent up, dammed streams of money. In Hongkong the words were read and some steamer went out, laden, from her harbour. Gold was poured into the hands of tea-planters in Ceylon. Scanty wages in strange coins, dribbled out to factory workers in Russian cotton mills. Gangs of navvies went to work laying railway lines across the veldt in Bechuanaland. There was no end to the energy controlled, directed by these cable messages, nor any bounds to the field of their influence. Somewhere in Ireland a farmer would go home along a desolate road, crossing brown bogs, thirsty and disconsolate, his lean beasts unsold at a fair where buyers were scarce or shy. What did he know of Ascher or Ascher know of him? Yet the price which he might take or must refuse for those hardly reared bullocks of his depended at the end of a long chain, on what the Aschers in their office said and did.

Perhaps hardly one of all the busy men I watched quite knew what he was doing. They juggled with figures, made precis of the reports of money markets, dissected and analysed the balance sheets of railway companies, decoded messages from London or from Paris, transcribed formulae as abstract, as remote from tangible things as the x and y of algebraic equations. These men all worked—the apologue of the quadratic equation held my mind—moving their symbols here and there, extracting roots, dissolving close-knit phrases into factors, cancelling, simplifying, but always dealing with symbols meaningless, unreal in themselves. Behind them was Ascher, Ascher and I suppose Stutz, who expressed realities in formulae, and, when the sums were done, extracted realities from the formulae again, achieving through the seemingly sterile processes new facts, fresh grasp of the things which are, greater power to deal with them. They knew and understood and held the whole world in leading strings, delicate as silk, invisible, impalpable, but strong.

The door of Ascher's private office opened and a man passed out. I glanced at him. He was a clean-shaved, keen-eyed, square-jawed man, the type which American business methods have produced, a man of resource and quick decision, but a man, so I guessed, who dealt with things, and money only as the price of things, the reward of making them. He lacked, so I felt, something of the fine spirituality of Ascher, the scientific abstraction of the man who lives in a rarer atmosphere of pure finance.

A clerk at my elbow invited me to leave my place and take my turn with Ascher.

I could not bring myself to plunge straightway into my business. I began by pretending that I had no real business at all.

"Any chance," I asked, "of our being travelling companions again? I am leaving New York almost at once."

"I'm afraid not," said Ascher. "I've a great deal to do here still."

"Those Mexican affairs?"

"Those among others."

"The Government here seems to be making rather a muddle of Mexico," I said.

Opinion on this subject was, so far as I knew, nearly unanimous among business men. Every one who owned shares in Mexican companies, every one who had invested hopefully a little while before in Mexican railways, every one who had any kind of interest in Mexico was of the same opinion about the inaction of the American Government.

"I think it is a muddle," said Ascher, "but the idea in the minds of the men who are making the muddle is a fine one. If only the world could be worked on those principles——"

"But it can't."

"Not yet," said Ascher. "Perhaps never. Yet the idea on which the Government in Washington proceeds is a noble one. Respect for constitutional order should be a greater thing as a principle of statesmanship than obvious expediency."

The man's unnatural detachment of view worried me. It was the same when Gorman blared out his stereotyped abuse of financiers, his well-worn cliches about money kings and poison spiders. Ascher agreed with him. Ascher, apparently, had some approval for the doctrinaire constitutionalism of university professors turned diplomats. I could not follow him to those heights of his.

"I was thinking," I said, "of going home by way of the West Indies."

"Yes? You will find it very agreeable. I was there in 1903 and remember enjoying myself greatly."

"I wish you and Mrs. Ascher would come too. It would be much pleasanter for me if I had you with me.

"It's very kind of you to say so; but——"

"Besides," I said, "I should see so much more. If I go by myself I shall step from a steamer into an hotel and from an hotel into a steamer. I shall be forced to buy a Baedeker, if there is a Baedeker for those regions. I shall be a tourist of the ordinary kind. But if I travelled with you I should really see things."

Ascher took up the telephone receiver.

"If you like," he said, "I can give you letters of introduction to our correspondents wherever you go. They are bankers, of course, but you will find them intelligent men."

He summoned a clerk.

"If you give me an idea of your route——" he said.

"At present," I said, "my plans are very vague. I haven't settled anything. Perhaps you will give me your advice."

He drew a sheet of paper towards him and began to write.

"You ought to see the work at Panama," he said. "It is very interesting and of course of immense importance. Certainly you must see that. Afterwards——"

He scribbled on his sheet of paper, making lists of place names and adding notes about ways of travelling.

"If you go further south still——" he said. "I don't recommend the Amazon, a huge river of course, but unless you are interested in rubber or entomology. The insect life I believe——"

"I'm interested in everything," I said, "even insects which bite."

"Well, Para, perhaps, then south again. The South American ports are worth seeing."

A clerk entered while he was speaking. Ascher handed him the list he had written.

"Look out the names of our agents in these places," he said, "and have letters of introduction made out to them for Sir James Digby."

The clerk left the room and I thanked Ascher warmly. It seemed to me that he was taking a great deal of trouble for which he could expect no kind of reward. He waved my gratitude aside.

"I think," he said, "that our agents will be able to make your trip interesting for you. They can tell you what you want to know about the trade and the natural wealth of the places you visit. They will put you in the way of finding out the trend of political feeling. It is their business to know these things, and in visiting new countries—new in the sense that they have only lately felt the influences of our civilisation—it is just these things that you will want to know. If you were going to Italy, or Egypt, or Greece——"

Ascher sighed. I felt that he would have preferred Italy to Brazil if he had been travelling for pleasure.

"Ah, there," I said, "an artist or a scholar would be a better friend to have than a banker."

"Even there," said Ascher, "the present and the future matter more than the past, perhaps. But are you tied at all by time? The tour which I have indicated will take some months."

"I am an idle man," I said. "I shall go on as long as your introductions last, gathering knowledge which will not be the slightest use to me or any one else."

"I had better provide you with a circular letter of credit," said Ascher. "It is never wise to carry considerable sums about in your pocket."

We had got to money, to business in the strictest sense of the word. My opportunity had plainly come for attacking the subject of the cash register. Yet I hesitated. A banker ought to be the easiest man in the world to talk business to. There is no awkwardness about the subject of toothache in a dentist's parlour. He expects to be talked to about teeth. It ought to have been an equally simple thing to speak to Ascher about the future of a company in which we were both interested. Yet I hesitated. There was something in his manner, a grave formality, which kept me miles away from him. I thanked him for the promise of the letter of credit and then sat silent for a minute.

"By the way," said Ascher, "I have just had a visit from a man on business in which you are interested."

"Was that the man who passed me in the anteroom before I was shown in here?"

"Yes. He came to talk to me about Gorman's new cash register. He was not an accredited agent, you will understand. He did not profess to represent anybody. He was not empowered to treat with us in any way, but——"

Ascher smiled faintly.

"I understand," I said, "a sort of informal ambassador who could easily be disowned if anything he said turned out to be inconvenient. In politics men of that sort are very useful; but I somehow had the idea that business methods are more straightforward."

"All negotiations," said Ascher, "whether in politics or business are carried on in much the same way. But before I go into his suggestions I had better tell you how the matter stands. Mildmay sent us his report and it was entirely favourable to the new machine. I think the invention is likely to turn out a valuable property. We have made inquiries and find out that the patent rights are duly protected here and in all the chief European countries. In fact——"

"It was really that and not my travels which I came to talk to you about to-day. I may take it that we have got a good thing."

"We think so," said Ascher, "and our opinion is confirmed by the fact that we are not the only people who think so. If I am right about the man who visited me this morning we have very good evidence that our opinion is sound. The men who are in the best position to know about cash registers, who are most interested in their future——"

"The makers of the existing machines?"

"Exactly. That is to say, if I am right about my visitor."

"But how did they—how could any one know about Tim Gorman's invention?"

Ascher shrugged his shoulders.

"Surely," I said, "Gorman can't have been such a fool as to talk to newspaper reporters."

"We need not suppose so," said Ascher. "My experience is that anything worth knowing always is known. The world of business is a vast whispering gallery. There is no such thing as secrecy."

"Well," I said, "the main point is that this man did know. What did he want?"

"He wanted us to sell the patent rights," said Ascher. "What he said was that he had a client—he posed as some kind of commission agent—who would pay a substantial sum for them."

"That is just what Gorman said would happen once it was understood that your firm is behind the new company."

"Gorman is—well, astute. But you understand, I am sure, that we cannot do that kind of business."

"I always had a suspicion," I said, "that Gorman's scheme was fishy."

"I do not say fishy," said Ascher. "Gorman's plan is legitimate, legitimate business, but business of an unenlightened kind. What is wrong with Gorman is that he does not see far enough, does not grasp the root principle of all business. We have a valuable invention. I do not mean merely an invention which will put money into the pocket of the inventor and into our pockets. If it were valuable only in that way Gorman would be quite right, and our wisest course would be to take what we could get with the least amount of risk and trouble, in other words to accept the best price which we could induce the buyers to give us. But this invention is valuable in quite another way. The new machine, if we are right about it, is going to facilitate the business of retail sellers all over the world. It will save time, increase accuracy, and, being cheaper, make its way into places where the old machines never went."

"Ah," I said, "curiously enough I looked at the matter in that way when Gorman first mentioned it to me. I said that the world ought to get the benefit of this invention."

Ascher nodded.

"I see that," I went on. "I understand that way of looking at it. But surely that's altruism, not business. Business men don't risk their money with the general idea of benefiting humanity. That isn't the way things are done."

"I agree," said Ascher. "It's not the way things are done or can be done at present, though there is more altruism in business than most people think. Even we financiers——"

"I know you subscribe to charity," I said, "largely, enormously."

"That's not what I mean," said Ascher. "But we need not go into that. I believe that business is not philanthropy, finance is not altruism."

"Then why——?" I said. "On strict business principles, altruism apart, why not take what we can get out of Tim Gorman's invention and let the thing itself drop into the dustheap?"

"On business principles," said Ascher, "on the strictest business principles, it would be foolish to do that. From time to time men hit on some improvement in the way of making things or in the way of dealing with things after they are made, that is to say in business methods. Every such improvement increases the wealth of the world, tends to make everybody richer. This invention which we have got hold of is a small thing. It's only going to do a little, a very little to make the world richer, but it is going to do something for it is going to lessen the labour required for certain results and therefore is going to increase men's power, a little, just a little. That is why we must make the thing available, if we can; in order to add to the general wealth, and therefore to our own wealth. Those are business principles."

Ascher paused. I had nothing to say for a moment. Business principles as he explained them were not the business principles I was accustomed to, certainly not the business principles on which Gorman acted. After a minute's silence Ascher went on.

"The mistake which is most often made in business," he said, "is to suppose that we grow rich by taking riches from other men, or that nations prosper by depriving other nations of prosperity. That would be true if riches consisted of money, and if there were just so much money and no more in the world. Then business and finance would be a scramble, in which the roughest and strongest scrambler would get most. But that is not so."

"Isn't it?" I said. "I should have thought that business just is a scramble."

"No," said Ascher, "it is not. Nations grow rich, that is to say, get comfort, ease, and even luxury, only when other nations are growing rich too, only because other nations are growing rich."

"The way to grow rich," I said, "is to make other people rich. Is that it? It sounds rather like one of the—what do you call them?—counsels of perfection in the Gospel."

"Perhaps it is a religious truth too," said Ascher. "I don't know. I have never studied religion. Some day I think I shall. There must be a great deal that is very interesting in the New Testament."

"Confound you, Ascher! Is there anything in heaven or earth that you don't look at from the outside, as if you were some kind of superior epicurean god?"

"I beg your pardon. I ought not to have spoken in that way. You are, no doubt, a Christian."

"Of course I am—in—in a general way."

"I have often thought," said Ascher slowly, "that I should like to be. But from the little I know of that religion——"

"I expect you know as much as I do," I said.

"It must be," said Ascher, "very hard to be a Christian."

I was not going to discuss that point with Ascher. It was bad enough to have an artistic soul awakened in me by Mrs. Ascher. I could not possibly allow her husband to lead me to the discovery that I had the other kind of soul. Nor was it any business of mine to work out harmonies between Christian ethics and the principles of modern banking. I detest puzzles of all kinds. It is far better, at all events far more comfortable, to take life as one finds it, a straightforward, commonplace affair. I have the greatest respect for Christianity of a moderate, sensible kind and I subscribe to the funds of the Church of Ireland. But when it comes to practical matters I find myself in agreement with Wordsworth's "Rob Roy,"

The good old rule Sufficeth me, the simple plan, That they should take who have the power And they should keep who can.

So long, of course, as one does not do anything shady. I do not like lying or theft.

Ascher sat looking at me as if he expected me to tell him exactly how hard it is to be a Christian. I made a determined effort to get back again to cash registers.

"Tim Gorman's invention will get its chance then?"

"Yes. If we can manage it the thing will get its chance. It will be made and, I think, people will use it."

"Mrs. Ascher will be very pleased to hear that."

"Ah," said Ascher. "Is she interested? But I remember now. Young Gorman has been sitting to her. She would naturally be interested in him."

"Her idea," I said, "is that Tim Gorman is producing a baby, with all the usual accompaniments of that difficult business, labour, you know, and pain. She regards you as the doctor in attendance, and she thinks it would be exceedingly wrong of you to choke the little thing."

Ascher looked at me quite gravely. For a moment I was afraid that he was going to say something about the paradoxical brilliance of the Irish mind. I made haste to stop him.

"That's Mrs. Ascher's metaphor," I said, "not mine. I should never have thought of it. I don't know enough about the artistic soul to appreciate the feelings of people who give birth to cash registers. But the idea is plain enough. Tim Gorman will be bitterly disappointed if he does not see girls in cheap restaurants putting actual shillings into those machines of his."

"From my wife's point of view," said Ascher, "and from mine, too, that ought to be an important consideration. It's the artist's feeling; but business and art—unfortunately business and art——"

"I don't see why they shouldn't kiss and be friends," I said. "They're not nearly such irreconcilable enemies as business and religion. Now that those two have lain down together like a lion and a lamb—I don't quite see how they do it, but in that new philosophy of yours it seemed quite a simple matter—there's no real reason why art shouldn't come in too."

But Ascher shook his head. He did not seem hopeful of a marriage between art and business. He knows a good deal about both of them, far more, by his own confession, than he knows about religion.



CHAPTER VIII.

Ascher was very generous to me in the matter of letters of introduction. A large bundle of them arrived at my hotel two days after I paid my visit to his office. There must have been fifty or sixty of them altogether. I sent for an atlas and found that I had a friend ready made for me in every port of any importance in the West Indies and on the east coast of South America as far down as Buenos Aires, and in a good many places inland. I was fascinated by the idea of such a tour; but it was plainly not an excursion to be undertaken without care and consideration. I lingered in New York for a fortnight, buying some additional clothes, getting together a few books on the South American republics, and working out steamboat routes.

I saw young Tim Gorman. He called on me, sent by Mrs. Ascher, to thank me for my good offices. I deserved no thanks; but on the general principle of taking what I could get I allowed the boy to pour gratitude all over me.

"I think," I said, "you ought to do fairly well out of the thing, financially, I mean."

"I don't care about that," said Tim, "at least not exactly. I—I——" he hesitated for a moment and then blurted out, "I don't particularly want to be rich."

"That," I said, "is precisely how you ought to feel at your age, but when you get to be forty—I'm forty, so I know—you'll probably be glad enough to have some money."

"I want some money now," said Tim. "Do you think I could get——? How much do you think I'll get out of my cash register?"

"Well," I said, "it's hard to name an exact figure, but it will be something pretty substantial."

"One thousand dollars?" said Tim anxiously.

"A great deal more than that. If Mr. Ascher makes the arrangements he contemplates you'll get a great deal more."

I had only the vaguest idea what Ascher meant to do, and could make no kind of guess at how much Tim would ultimately get, but I felt pretty safe in promising two hundred pounds.

"Do you think I could get it at once?" said Tim. "Or even five hundred dollars? I think I could manage with five hundred dollars. The fact is——"

"You want to get out of that circus," I said. "I don't wonder. It must be a very tiresome job."

"Oh, no. I don't mind the circus. It's rather a nuisance of course moving about, and we always are moving. But I have plenty of time to myself. It isn't to get away from the circus that I want the money. The fact is that I'm making some experiments."

"Another invention?" I said. "What a prolific creature you are! No sooner have you perfected a cash register than you start——"

"Oh, I've been at this for some time, for years. I believe I've hit on a dodge—— I say, do you know anything about Movies?"

The word, though common on our side of the Atlantic now, was at that time peculiar to the American language.

"Cinematographs?" I said. "I've seen them of course. You have them in your circus, haven't you, as part of the show?"

"Yes. That's what set me thinking about them. I've always felt that the next step in perfecting the cinematograph would be doing away with the screen, putting the figures on the stage, that is to say reflections of them, so that they would actually move about backwards and forwards instead of on a flat surface. You understand?"

When I was a boy there was a popular entertainment known as "Pepper's Ghost." What appeared to be a real figure moved about before the eyes of the audience, was pierced by swords and otherwise ill-treated without suffering any inconvenience. The thing was worked by some arrangement of mirrors. Tim evidently had a plan for combining this illusion with the cinematograph.

"Don't you think," he said, "that it would be a great thing?"

"It would be a perfectly beastly thing," I said. "The cinematograph is bad enough already. If you add a grosser realism to it——"

Tim looked at me. I am nearly sure that there were tears in his eyes.

"That's just what Mrs. Ascher thinks," he said.

"I daresay she does. She probably regards the cinematograph as a sin against art. What you propose would be an actual blasphemy."

"Oh," said Tim, "that's exactly what she said. Blasphemy! Do you really think so too? I wouldn't go on with my experiments if I thought that. But I don't believe you can be right. I—I went round to see Father Bourke. That was after Mrs. Ascher said it was blasphemy and I really wanted to know. Father Bourke is one of the priests at St. Gabriel's. I consulted him."

"Well," I said, "what did he tell you?"

"He said it was all right and that I needn't bother about what Protestants said was blasphemy. They don't know. At least Father Bourke seemed to think they couldn't know."

"You go by what Father Bourke says and you'll be safe."

I should particularly like to hear Father Bourke and Mrs. Ascher arguing out the subject of blasphemy together. They might go on for years and years before either of them began to understand what the other meant by the word. But it would be little less than a crime to involve the simple soul of Tim Gorman in the maze of two separate kinds of casuistry.

"In any case," I said, "I don't take Mrs. Ascher's view of the matter. I don't agree with her."

"I don't see," said Tim, "how cinematographs can be blasphemies so long as there aren't any pictures of religious things. I'm sure it must be all right and I can go on with what I want to do. If I can succeed in making the figures stand out from one another, as if they were really there——"

"You'll add a new terror to life," I said. "But that needn't stop you doing it if you can."

"I think I can," he said eagerly. "You see it's the next thing to be done. The cinematograph is perfect up to that point It must make a new start if it's to go any further. I should like to be the man who makes the next step possible. What's wanted now is—is——"

"The illusion of distance."

"That's it. That's what I mean. It's a matter of optics. Just making a few adjustments, and I think I see the way to manage it."

"If you do," I said, "you'll make an immense fortune. The world will pay anything, absolutely anything to the man who provides it with a new torture. It's an odd twist in human nature—though I don't know why I should say that. Oddness is really the normal thing in human nature."

"But I want a thousand dollars," said Tim, "or five hundred dollars at the very least. I must try experiments."

"If you ask your brother——" I said.

"Michael isn't nice to me about it," said Tim. "He isn't nice at all. When I asked him for a thousand dollars he said he'd get it for me on condition that I allowed him to manage my cash register in his own way. But I won't do that. I know what he wants to do."

"His idea," he said, "is to let your invention lapse."

"I know. The machine will never be made. But I want it to be made. I want to see it working everywhere all over the world. You see I'm always travelling about with the circus, sometimes in America, sometimes in England. We go to a lot of different towns. We go to all the big towns there are. I want to be able to go into shops everywhere, in every town in the world and see my machine there. Don't you understand?"

"Perfectly," I said. "Mrs. Ascher explained the whole position to me thoroughly. It's the artist's soul in you."

A look of puzzled annoyance came over the boy's face. His forehead wrinkled and his fine eyes took an expression of painful doubt as they met mine.

"Mrs. Ascher says things like that," he said, "and I don't know what she means. I am not an artist. I never learned to draw, even; at least not pictures. I can do geometrical drawing, of course, and make plans of machines; but that's not being an artist. I can't paint. Why does she say I am an artist?"

"That," I said, "is one of her little mannerisms. You will have to put up with it."

Tim uses the word artist in a simple old-fashioned way, very much as Father Bourke uses "blasphemy." There is a good deal to be said for their practice. People like Mrs. Ascher ought to invent new terms when they want to express uncommon thoughts. They have no right to borrow words like "artist" and "blasphemy" from common speech in order to set them parading about the world with novel meanings attached to them. It is not fair to people like Tim Gorman and his Father Bourke. It is not fair to the words themselves. I should not like to be treated in that way if I were a word. I cannot imagine anything more annoying to a respectable, steady-going word than to be called upon suddenly to undertake work to which it is not accustomed. The domestic housemaid is perfectly right in resisting any effort to make her do new kinds of work. Her formula, "It's not my place," used when she is asked to make a slice of toast, is unanswerable. Why should words be worse treated than housemaids? It is the business of "artist" to stand for the man who paints pictures in oils. "Blasphemy" describes aggravated breaches of the third commandment. What right had Mrs. Ascher or any one else to press them into new services? There ought to be a strong trade union among words.

"And now," said Tim, "she says I'm not an artist after all because I want to make movies more real. And she's angry with me. She turned me out of her studio because I wouldn't promise not to. Of course, I wouldn't promise such a thing. I think I see how it can be done. The great difficulty is to secure an exact adjustment of the mirrors. There are other difficulties. There's the awkwardness of transparent figures crossing in front of each other. Also——"

"My dear boy," I said, "don't explain the thing to me. I am totally incapable of understanding anything connected with mechanics, optics or hydrostatics."

I can make as good an attempt as most men at replying intelligently to Mrs. Ascher even when she talks of "values," atmospheres, feeling and sympathy, though her use of these familiar words conveys only the vaguest ideas to my mind. I can, after a period of intense mental effort, understand what Ascher means by exchanges, premiums, discounts and bills, though he uses these words in unfamiliar ways. But I am defeated utterly by the man who talks about escapements, compensating balances and clutches. I suspected that Tim Gorman would pelt me with even more recondite scientific terms if I let things go on.

"You may take my word for it," I said, "that you'll get a thousand dollars and more, in the end; but you may have to wait for it. In the meanwhile keep on thinking out your plan for doubling the horrors of our places of popular entertainment."

That was all I could do for Tim Gorman. I do not think that he deserved more than cold comfort and disagreeable advice. I might have given him, or lent him, a little money, if he had been at work on a really useful invention, something which would benefit humanity. There are lots of such things waiting to be invented. There ought to be some way of stabbing a man who insists on ringing you up on the telephone at unreasonable hours and saying tiresome things. We cannot claim to be civilised until we have some weapon for legitimate self defence attached to every telephone, something which could be operated easily and swiftly by pressing a button at the side of the receiver. It is not necessary that the man at the other end of the wire should be struck dead, but he ought to suffer severe physical pain. If Tim Gorman would turn his inventive genius in that direction, I should not hesitate to advance money to him, even to the half of my possessions.

I called on Mrs. Ascher again before I left New York. I wanted to hear her version of the misunderstanding with Tim. I went, of course, to the studio, not to the hotel. Mrs. Ascher is at her best in the studio. Besides I was much more likely to find her there than anywhere else.

She was hard at work when I entered on a figure, at least two feet high, of a man of very fine muscular development. I glanced at it and then asked where Tim Gorman's head was.

"You know," I said, "that I admired that piece of work greatly."

Mrs. Ascher waved her hand towards a table in the darkest corner of the room.

"It's not finished," she said, "and never will be. I've lost all interest in it. If you like it take it away. I'll give it to you with pleasure."

I found poor Tim, not even swathed in wet bandages, among a litter of half finished fauns and nymphs and several attempts at a smooth-haired dog. Mrs. Ascher had done very little work at him since I saw him before. She had, in pursuance of her own idea, turned half the saucer on which the head stood into a mat of water-lily leaves. The other half—and I felt gratified when I saw this—was worked up into an unmistakable hammer and a number of disproportionately large nails. Tim's face and head still expressed lofty idealism in the way which had fascinated me when I first saw the thing. But Mrs. Ascher had evidently neglected some necessary precaution in dealing with her material. The neck—and Tim's neck is an unusually long one—had collapsed. A jagged crack ran half round it close under the right ear. The left side of the neck was curiously crumpled. The head leaned rakishly towards the water-lily side of the saucer.

I remember hearing once of an irreverent choir boy. At a Christmas party, a sort of feast of an Abbot of Unreason held in the less sacred parts of the cathedral precincts, the brat decorated the statue of an Archbishop with a pink and blue paper cap taken from a cracker. The effect must have been much the same as that produced by the subsidence of Tim Gorman's neck.

"Do you really mean to give it to me?" I said. "I should like to have it very much. I should set it up on my writing table and call it 'Disillusion.' But do you think it will collapse any more?"

"Has it collapsed? I suppose it did not dry properly."

Mrs. Ascher did not even look at it.

"Oh," I said, "the present effect, the cynical contempt for the original noble spirituality, is the result of an accident? What tricks circumstances play on us! A slight irregularity in drying and a hero becomes a clown. The case of 'Imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay' is not so bad as that of an idealist whose neck has cracked."

"I'm dreadfully disappointed in that boy," said Mrs. Ascher. "Will you forgive me if I do not talk of him? Even now I cannot bear to."

She sighed heavily, showing how much she felt the loss of Tim's soul. Then she turned to me with one of those bright smiles, one of those charmingly bright smiles, which are the greatest achievements of serious women. Very religious women, women with artists' souls and the intenser suffragists have these bright smiles. They work them up, I suppose, so as to show that they can be as cheerful as any one else when they choose to try.

"Come and see what I'm doing now," she said.

I looked very carefully at the man's figure in front of her.

"This," she said, "is manhood, virility, energy, simple strength, directness, all that this poor neurotic world is yearning for, the primal force, uncomplex, untroubled, just the exultation of the delight of being."

"It reminds me faintly of some one," I said, "the head and face, I mean; but I can't quite fix the likeness."

She clapped her hands with delight.

"You see it," she said, "I am so glad. It's not meant to be a mere likeness. I need not tell you that. Still I'm glad you see that it resembles him. I am working to express his soul, the mere features, the limbs, are nothing. The being which burns within, that is what I am trying to express. But the fact that you see the external likeness makes me feel more sure that my interpretation of the physical features is the right one."

"Surely," I said, "it's not Gorman, the other Gorman, the elder Gorman, Michael!"

"Yes," she said.

"Has he been sitting for you?" I asked.

I stopped myself just in time. I was very nearly saying "sitting to you like that?" The figure on which she was at work was entirely undraped. I do not suppose that Mrs. Ascher would have been the least embarrassed even if I had said "like that." The artist's soul scorns conventions. But I should have felt awkward if she had answered "Yes."

"Not exactly sitting to me," she said. "He just comes here and talks. While he talks I catch glimpses of his great, buoyant, joyous soul and fashion the poor clay to express it."

"I did not know he was back in New York," I said.

"Oh, yes, he has been here a week, perhaps more. To me it seems as if he had been here for ever."

I could not even guess at what she meant by that so I did not try to answer her.

"I wonder he didn't look me up," I said.

"Ah," said Mrs. Ascher, "he has had no time. That abundant, restless energy of his is for ever pressing out into fresh activities."

I gathered, more from her tone than from her actual words that only an effete, devitalised creature would call on me. A man of abundant energy would naturally sit half the day in Mrs. Ascher's studio, while she made a fancy body for him in damp clay.

She clasped her hands and gazed with rapt intensity at the statue of Gorman's soul.

"His patriotism!" she said. "After living in that atmosphere of nebulous cosmopolitanism which is what we hypercivilised people have created in the world, it is everything to get back to the barbaric simplicity of the old love for country."

"Did he happen to mention," I asked, "whether he succeeded in wheedling five thousand dollars out of that Detroit man?"

Mrs. Ascher did not hear that; or if she did chose to ignore it.

"The splendid destiny of Ireland," she said, "has been to escape age after age the malarial fever of culture. The Romans never touched her shores. The renaissance passed her by. She has not bowed the knee to our modern fetish of education. You and I have our blood diluted with——"

Gorman must have been at his very best while he talked to Mrs. Ascher. He had evidently made a kind of whirlpool of her mind. Her version of his philosophy of history and politics seemed to me to be going round and round in narrowing circles with confusing speed. The conception of the Romans as apostles of the more malarial kinds of culture was new to me. I had been brought up to believe—not that any one does believe this as an actual fact—that Ireland was once and to some extent still is, an island of Saints and Scholars. I did not obtain any very clear idea of what Mrs. Ascher's blood was diluted with, but there must have been several ingredients, for she went on talking for quite a long time. When she stopped I made a protest on behalf of my country.

"We're not so backward as all that," I said. "We have a Board of National Education and quite a large number of technical schools. In the convents they teach girls to play the piano."

Mrs. Ascher shook her head slowly. I gathered that she knew much more about Irish education than I did and regarded it as unworthy even of serious contempt.

"Dear Ireland!" she said, "splendid Ireland!"

I suppose Gorman must have been talking to her about fairies, the dignified, Celtic kind, and the dear dark head of Kathaleen ni Houlihan. Gorman is capable of anything. However as my country was being admired I thought I might as well get a little of the credit for myself.

"I am an Irishman," I said.

Mrs. Ascher looked at me with withering scorn.

"You," she said, "you—you—you are——"

She was evidently in difficulties. I helped her out as best I could.

"An Irish gentleman," I said.

"An alien," she replied, "a stranger in the land you call your own."

"That," I said, "is just what I say, put more forcibly and picturesquely."

Then Gorman came in, without knocking at the door. I was very glad to see him. In another minute Mrs. Ascher and I would, perhaps, have quarrelled. Gorman saved us from that catastrophe. I do not think I ever understood before that moment the secret of Gorman's charm. He came into that studio, a place charged with the smell of damp clay, like a breeze from a nice green field. He was in a thoroughly good temper. I suspect that he hurt Mrs. Ascher's hand when he shook it.

"I've just been looking at Mrs. Ascher's statue of your soul," I said. "Splendid muscles in the calves of its legs. You must be enormously proud of them."

Gorman, under pretence of seeking a place in which to put his hat, turned his back on Mrs. Ascher for a minute. As he did so he deliberately winked at me.

Some day I mean to get Gorman in a private place, "away from everywhere," as Mrs. Ascher would say. When I get him there I shall ask him two questions and insist on having an answer. First I shall ask him why he devotes himself to Mrs. Ascher. He is not in love with her. We Irish have not many virtues, but we can boast that we seldom make love to other men's wives. Besides, Mrs. Ascher is not the kind of woman who allows strange men to make love to her. She is, in essentials, far less emancipated than she thinks. It is just possible that he finds her responsive to his fondness for the more flamboyant kinds of rhetoric. Gorman really likes talking about Ireland as an oppressed and desolated land. It is easy enough to move large audiences to enthusiasm by that kind of oratory. It is not so easy, I imagine, to get single, sympathetic listeners in private life. Mrs. Ascher apparently laps up patriotic sentiment with loud purrs. That may be why Gorman likes her. The next thing I mean to ask him is what he means by patriotism. I can understand quite easily what Irish patriotism meant ten years ago. Gorman's friends wanted my land, a definite, tangible thing. I wanted it myself. But now they have got the land, and yet Gorman goes on talking patriotism. It is not as if he had no sense of humour. Gorman sees the absurdity of the things he says just as plainly as I do. The ridiculous side of his own enthusiasm is never long absent from his consciousness; yet he goes on just the same. I wish I understood how he manages it.



CHAPTER IX.

Now that my leg has been smashed up hopelessly, by that wretched German shell, I shall never ride or shoot again. I have to content myself with writing books to occupy my time, a very poor form of amusement compared to tramping the fields after partridge. I suppose it is inevitable that a man in my position should indulge in regretful memories. My mind goes back now and then to certain days in my boyhood and I find myself picturing scenes through which I shall not move again.

There are fields stretching back from the demesne which used to be mine. In the autumn many of them were stubble fields and among them were gorse covered hills. I used to go through them with my gun and dogs in early October mornings. There were—no doubt there still are—though I shall not see them—very fine threads of gossamer stretching across astonishingly wide spaces. The dew hung on them in tiny drops and glittered when the sun rose clear of the light mist and shone on them. Sometimes the threads floated free in the air, attached to some object at one end, the rest borne about by faint breaths of wind, waved to and fro, seeking other attachment elsewhere. Some threads reached from tufts of grass to little hummocks or to the twigs which form the boles of elm trees. Others still, with less ambitious span, went only from one blade of grass to another or united the thorns of whin bushes. The lower air, near the earth, was full of these threads. They formed an indescribably delicate net cast right over the fields and hills. I used to see them glistening, rainbow coloured when the sun rays struck them. Oftener I was aware of their presence only when my hands had touched and broken them or when they clung to my clothes, dragged from their fastenings by my passing through them.

I have no idea what place these gossamer threads occupy in the economy of nature. I find it difficult to believe that the life of the fields and gorsy hills and young plantations would be either better or worse if there were no such thing as gossamer. But I am no longer contented with my ignorance. I mean to find out all that is known about gossamer, and satisfy myself of the truth of the tradition that the threads are spun by tiny spiders, though surely with very little hope of snaring flies.

I spent six months making the tour which Ascher planned for me. I returned to London in the spring of 1914, full of interest in what I had seen and learned. I intend some day to write a book of travels, to give an account of my experiences. I shall describe the long strip of the world over which I wandered as a landscape on a quiet autumn morning, netted over with gossamer. That is the way it strikes me now, looking back on it all. Ascher and men like him have spun fine threads, covering every civilised land with a web of credit, infinitely complex, so delicate that a child's hand could tear it.

A storm, even a strong breeze comes, and the threads are dragged from their holdings and waved in wild confusion through the air. A man, brutal as war, goes striding through the land, and, without knowing what he does, bursts the filaments and destroys the shimmering beauty which was before he came. That, I suppose, is what happens. But the passing of a man, however violent he is, is the passing of a man and no more. Even if a troop of men marches across the land their marching is over and done with soon. They have their day, but afterwards there are other days. Nature is infinitely persistent and gossamer is spun again.

I remember meeting, quite by chance, on a coasting steamer on which I travelled, a bishop. He was not, judged by strict ecclesiastical standards, quite entitled to that rank. He belonged to some American religious organisation of which I had no knowledge, but he called himself, on the passenger list, Bishop Zacchary Brown. He was apostolic in his devotion to the Gospel as he understood it. His particular field of work lay in the northern part of South America. He ranged, so I understood, through Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. He was full of hope for the future of these lands, their spiritual future. I had long talks with him and discovered that he regarded education, the American form of it, and commerce, the fruit of American enterprise, as the enemies of superstition and consequently the handmaids of the Gospel.

He wanted to see schools and colleges scattered over the republic in which he was interested. He wanted to see these lands heavily fertilised with capital.

"If you have any spare money," he said, "put it into——"

I think he said fruit farming in Colombia. Whatever the business was—I forgot at the time to make a note of the particulars—he promised that it would develop enormously when the Panama Canal was opened. The advice may have been perfectly sound; but I do not think it was disinterested. Bishop Zacchary Brown was not anxious about my future or my fortune. He did not care, cannot have cared, whether the Panama Canal made me rich or not. Nor did it seem to him an important thing that the fruit trade of South America should develop. What he cared for was his conception of religion. He saw in the inflow of capital the way of triumph for his Gospel, the means of breaking up old careless, lazy creeds, the infusion of energy and love of freedom. Ascher, so I conceived the situation, was to stretch his threads from Calvary to the grapefruit trees of Cartagena.

At Bahia I was introduced to a Brazilian statesman. I met him first at the house of one of Ascher's banker friends. We talked to each other in French, and, as we both spoke the language badly, understood each other without much difficulty. It is one of the peculiarities of the French language that the worse it is spoken the easier it is to understand. A real Parisian baffles me completely. My Brazilian statesman was almost always intelligible.

He was interested in international politics, the international politics of the western hemisphere. I found that he was distrustful of the growing power of the United States. He suspected a policy of Empire, a far-reaching scheme of influence, if not actual dominion, centred in Washington. He regarded the Monroe Doctrine as the root from which such an extension of power might grow. It was no business of mine to argue with him, though I am convinced that the citizens of the United States are of all peoples the least obsessed by the imperial idea. I tried, by looking sympathetic, to induce him to develop his theory. In the end I gathered that he hoped for security from the imperial peril through the increase of wealth and therefore power in the South American republics.